Post Your Comment

54 Comments

the 939 AMD cpu will only be my upgrade path (unless i wait and some thing els comes out)

my NF7-S v2.0 mobo has 2x faster mem speed then an s754 so in my view it be an Downgrade if i whent to it

my upgrade (dream at the mo :)
MSI K8N Neo2 (waiting for the nForce4 ultra to comes out) or something like it (but nf4 chip)
3500+ 939 (mite even wait for the 4000+ or the FX55 to come down in price)
2x 512 ddr 400 OCZ low latency stuff (or other stuff that mite run better then OCZ)Reply

Hmm
Why on earth bring out this board for s754 NOW??
Do they honestly think ppl would have waited this long for s754? They SHOULD have made it s939.

I see this as lost revenue for DFI.

Fantastic board yes, but for those who are looking to currently upgrade, will there be many who opt for this baord over a s939?

I wish they had brought it out as a s939, as I would forget about buying an MSI K8N Neo2 in an instant.
Its all well and good having the best board, but you need to have some savvy to, and think about when the introduction of your board will result in the greatest revenue!
And thats just plain common sense.Reply

Using both the nForce & Marvell SATA controlers with the same 3 SATA disks on a RAID0 array : is it more likely to cause a performance drop - comparing to 2 disks on ports 3 & 4 - more than anything else ?

In my case, wouldn't it be thus better to go for a Silicon Image 3114r instead, like on the Asus K8N-E Deluxe ?

"With our stock 3200+ and ATI Radeon 9800 Pro, the DFI is one of the better 2nd generation 754 boards. Standard performance tests demonstrate the DFI LANParty UT is very competitive with other recent Athlon 64 boards in Direct X 9 games, which is all we would expect. UT2004 and Far Cry include results from Socket 939 and Intel 775 for comparison. Since both the 939 and 775 results were with faster CPUs running an nVidia 6800 Ultra AGP 8X/PCIe, it is remarkable that the scores are as close as they are."

I nearly missed that paragraph. Perhaps you should make it stand out a little better? Reply

Sweet Mobo...sounds inviting for my planned system upgrade from my Abit NF7-S with my O/C 2500 mobility proc...only concern...will I have to mortgage my home to be able to afford this board...afterall..these goodies do come with a price tag.Reply

I just spoke with Oskar Wu, the board's designer. Oskar says they have 1GB dimms from Samsung that work fine on the LANParty UT, and that the Samsung 1GB dimms use 512MB chips in their construction. He said the only reason for the caution on 512MB chips (not dimms) was because they have not verified operation with dimms made with 1GB chips. All of the 1GB dimms I have here for testing use 512MB chips in their construction.

Oskar also stated that 2 dimms work best in dimm slots 1 and 2, and not 1 and 3. He said try 1 and 2 and you will get better performance with 2 dimms.Reply

Great article Wesley. Lucky for you guys in the states DFI's RMA process is actually good, here in Europe (UK) we have to deal with DFI NL (Netherlands), and they tbh are crap. So bad in-fact some retailers are debating whether to carry future boards from DFI. I certainly hope they do though, as this board sure looks like a belter, and it WILL be replacing my Asus K8V-SE Deluxe which has no PCI lock (although its still a great board). Reply

#23-#26 -
You are correct. Since the board was sent without the usual manual, I assumed the SATA ports between the AGP slot and CPU socket were SATA 1 and 2. I now have the manual file, and in fact those ports are identified as SATA 3 and 4.

The 250GB SATA drive was connected to SATA 3 for the overclocking tests.Reply

I think its tested with Raid 3+4 that are the two native Ports directly at NF250GB.
The Ports 1+2 are native also, but have to use an external PHY.
This Ports 1+2 are finished when HTT > 240 MHZ !!
Try it.....

Remeber: Main S-ATA Problems only at PORT 1+2 because of the PHY .....Reply

Great article man, but I almost blew by the part where you mentioned that the Far Cry and UT results were with a 9800pro vs 6800ultras. You might consider putting asterisk on those graphs and bold or highlight the huge difference in graphics cards.
It might help those who prefer to only look at the pretty pictures.

I think the yellow looks cool, but a UV reactive plastic would have been cool along with it. This does seem a bit more of a 'budget' type board when compared to other LanParty series boards. I sure do like it a lot, and I have considered moving from my old MSI K8T Neo board to this one (so I am kinda happy about it being S754). I do wonder about the two SATA cables near the AGP socket, as they are extremely out of the way, and it brings more cable clutter to the center of the board.Reply

#16 - The test bed had a MaXLine III 250GB SATA hard drive with 16MB of buffer. We first tested with the SATA on Channel 1 between the AGP slot and the CPU -- the plan was to see where SATA failed and then switch to IDE to find the top OC. When we reached DDR600 then DDR616 while running this SATA drive we saw no point in the IDE switch. This board is really stable in OC - even with SATA.Reply

You say on page 6 that you ran the overclocking tests with a SATA hard drive. Can you please confirm that you did DDR616 running a SATA hard drive, because I've read that SATA drives can hold back overclocking.Reply

#1 - The Asus K8N-E will be included in a roundup of new 754 boards in the next week.

#2,#4 - Corrections made

#7 - The final correct name of the series is LANParty UT, as you point out. The name has been corrected in the article. DFI considered many last minute changes - from full LANParty to bargain board. Final decisions were quite recent.

#9 - We received this production board by Express shipment direct from Taiwan on September 1, after several delays. We are told by DFI that this is the production board. DFI, like other manufacturers, will likely make further improvements during the production run.Reply

I just built a Shuttle XPC for a friend and it had custom SATA connectors on the board and (slightly) custom cables that make things a lot better. The board connector is a lot like a USB socket, it has an outer support ring with the original SATA data pins in the center (its backward compatible). The cable has added bits on it that make it snap into the board connector. No more accidentally pulle cable. I wish the SATA mechanical specs would be revised to such a system or something similar. The electrical aspects of SATA are awesome but they didn't put much though into the connectors. Reply

"We were also able to complete stress testing at 300x8 with 2.5-3-4-10 memory timings. At that speed of 2.4Ghz at DDR600, we achieved the following results:
Quake 3 - 474.0
Return to Castle Wolfenstein-Enemy Territory-Radar - 104.3 "